Author: DC (Page 337 of 1086)

 

‘Halfway through a video of Johanna Went’s 1988 performance Passion Container, a masked, horned, enrobed figure holds up a red container that resembles an oversized organ. Blood pours from it, reddening the figure, now dancing to a No Wave beat. As the dance escalates into an ecstatic bounce, blood drenches the robe.

‘The trancelike dance and allusions to sacrifice recall the quasi-ritualistic performances that characterized Viennese Actionism in the 1960s, but the overall aesthetic is comically macabre. Still, Went’s over-the-top scene is riveting. Few artists would combine the symbols of ritual with noise- and dance music, fake blood, and homemade costumes, and perhaps only Johanna Went would animate it all with humor.

‘Passion Container is one of around 200 shows Went performed from 1977 through the ’80s in Los Angeles. Performances at venues such as Franklin Furnace (1987) and the Lincoln Center (1991) in New York and Track 16 Gallery (2007) in LA show Went’s more formal side, but it’s the club shows — in which she quick-changes costumes, gyrates, grunts and howls, and smears and swallows viscous ooze — that established her as a cult figure in the annals of LA art and punk, and gave her the nickname “hyena of performance art.”

‘Went began performing in 1975 with improvisational theater troupes Para-Troupe and the World’s Greatest Theater Company. Following a move to Los Angeles in 1977, she started performing solo, adding live music after meeting sound artist and percussionist Z’EV and composer Mark Wheaton, who would become her collaborator for the next four decades.

‘It’s no surprise that Went’s boundary-pushing performances drew eyes from the experimental LA club scene. Consider another moment in Passion Container, in which she wears a bulbous mask with an anus-like mouth, and a nun character shovels gruel into a larger anus-mouth. Signifiers are shifting — mouth, anus, eye, sun. Later, her face emerges from the massive vagina of a larger-than-life puppet as two sewage-green demons fling a huge, pillowy three-eyed head into the audience. The show associates the feminine and maternal with the earth, both threatened by monstrous masculinity (reified in a giant phallus). But Went’s frenzied performance is too fast and chaotic to be contemplated; it’s experienced.

‘In an article on Went for 4Columns, author Geeta Dayal writes: “When Lady Gaga debuted her meat dress in 2010, I had a flashback: it sounded like something Went would have done in 1982. In a just world, Johanna Went would be as much of a household name as Lady Gaga.”

‘Went continued to perform into the 1990s and, less frequently, the 2000s. (She stopped performing after Ablutions Of A Nefarious Nature at Track 16 in 2007 due to an ankle injury and arthritis.) She has received some of her due in 2020, with a limited-edition reissue of her 1982 debut record Hyena (on red vinyl) and recent retrospective, Passion Container, at the Box in Los Angeles. The exhibition (which closed March 28), displayed photos, ephemera, art, and costumes drawn from Went’s personal archive, alongside screenings of her performances (available to view online).

‘The costumes, which Went constructed mostly from discards found on streets and in dumpsters, combine craft with invention. Symbols of traditional women’s roles — baby dolls, high-heeled shoes, a nun’s habit — are integrated into colorful agglomerations of unruly femininity. In one eye-catching example, figures and symbols are painted on a metallic pink robe with a grotesque pink mask. Jarring juxtapositions of stuffed animals and dolls, skulls, and dildos exaggerate the creepy side of the visual extravaganza. Along with demented Muppet-like soft sculptures (including the aforementioned three-eyed head and a giant vagina spewing red fabric), they underscore Went’s ingenuity as a maker as well as a performer.

‘More recently, Went (who still lives in Los Angeles) has been working on drawings for new costumes and writing and performing spoken word pieces, while organizing, editing, and preserving her audio, video, and photographic archives with Wheaton.

‘Her exhibition at the Box has made her “seriously consider the possibility of working with younger able bodied dancers and performers,” she said by email. “Those options have occurred to me before, but the public’s response to the Box exhibit was far greater than I had expected and reacquainted me with my audience.”

‘While Went’s transgression of categories is part of her work’s fascination, it has presented challenges to audiences. For instance, an Artforum reviewer in 1983 criticized her work as a “parody of transgression.” Implicit in this criticism, and its implication that parody and transgression are mutually exclusive, is the discomfort that unclassifiable things cause us as a culture. Went transgressed not only genre but also bodily and symbolic boundaries. Her performances have addressed feminine tropes, such as the mother and virgin, and faux-sacrificial blood is conflated with menstrual blood; in Passion Container and other performances she volleyed giant, soiled tampons back and forth with the crowd. These gestures recall Julia Kristeva’s designation, in Powers of Horror, of polluting objects as either excremental or menstrual, the former threatening the ego from without, the latter from within, both ultimately endangering what anthropologist Mary Douglas calls our “cherished classifications.”

‘Went’s outré spectacles — intermingling horror and hilarity — incorporated both. Messy, anarchic, sexualized, they engaged fluidity and flux, refusing to be reduced to a single thing.’ — Natalie Haddad

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Johanna Went, the “Hyena of Performance Art”
Johanna Went @ Bandcamp
Johanna Went @ Discogs
Catherine Taft on Johanna Went @ Artforum
Johanna Went @ Forced Exposure
Johanna Went @ The Box
Johanna Went: Where to go after perfection?
Bloody pig heads, jagged music
Johanna Went: Passion Container
JOHANNA WENT: NO WAVE PERFORMANCE ARTIST
Johanna Went @ Ubuweb
Johanna Went: Slave to the Grave
Johanna Went @ LARB

 

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Audio Recordings

Hyena 1982 EP

Slave Beyond the Grave

Live On Broadway 8/21/82 – cassette

Benny’s Nightmare

Saint Joan Not Alone

Bad End

 

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Interview: Women in Punk: Alice Bag and Johanna Went

 

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Visuals

‘The radical performance artist Johanna Went is one of the true legends of the California underground, and one who deserves much wider renown. I first came across her name about two decades ago, while interviewing some punk and post-punk bands from the 1980s. Musicians would talk in awed tones about Went’s infamous shows at venues like San Francisco’s now-defunct Mabuhay Gardens and the late Hong Kong Café in Los Angeles. She was known for transfixing and sometimes gory performances, featuring fantastical costumes made of materials filched from dumpsters and strange, ritualistic improvised music. But detailed information about her work was disappointingly hard to find. When Lady Gaga debuted her meat dress in 2010, I had a flashback: it sounded like something Went would have done in 1982. In a just world, Johanna Went would be as much of a household name as Lady Gaga.

‘One of the best sources of information on Went is RE/Search #6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook, a 1983 bible for the industrial music landscape edited by V. Vale and Andrea Juno. The book includes interviews with well-known bands like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, but also with key figures in the subculture who formed the vital connective tissue of entire scenes. These were people like Mark Pauline, the wily founder of robot wrecking crew Survival Research Laboratories, and musician and provocateur Monte Cazazza, who originally coined the term “industrial music.”

‘The Los Angeles gallery the Box has mounted a necessary and wide-ranging retrospective of Went’s work from the 1970s to the 2000s titled Passion Container, its name derived from a 1988 performance. Numerous soft sculptures and costumes fill the space—colorful, hilarious, and often grotesque characters, arranged dynamically as if they were attending a particularly demented party. As you look at them leering and posing, they seem almost alive. Many of these outfits were originally worn by Went in her early stage performances.

‘Passion Container is a crucial step in reviving Went’s riveting body of work. Further exhibitions globally would help to reassert her legacy as one of the most distinctive performance artists of our time—not just on the West Coast, but the world at large. But there should be more—perhaps a book, a tour, a major documentary. And this work shouldn’t just live in the visual-art world; it should be part of the history of music. The stories of punk, post-punk, and industrial music would not have been the same without her searing and original presence.’ — Geeta Dayal, 4columns

 

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Gig

Bloodletting (Overview/showreel, 1988)
Compilation edit: Mark Wheaton

 

Johns Place (1977)

 

Hollywood Central Theater (1979)
Duration: 15 minutes, 13 seconds
Music: Paul M. Young (Serge Modular), Z’EV (percussion)

 

The Worm (Cue: 15:27 – 18:22, 1980)
8mm silent film by Bill Derby
Duration: 2 minutes, 55 seconds
Featuring Johanna Went with score by Mark Wheaton

 

New Wave Theater (1980)
Duration: 6 minutes, 7 seconds
Featuring Johanna Went with Brock Wheaton (drums) and Mark Wheaton (Steiner Parker synthesizer)

 

UCLA Live (1982)
Video directed by Shirley Clarke
Duration: 9 minutes, 12 seconds
Performers: Johanna Went with music by Mark Wheaton (Steiner Parker synthesizer)
and Brock Wheaton (drums)
Camera: Bruce McCrimmon, Martin Kersels, Kevin Barrett
Assistants: Peggy Frarrar DiCaprio and George DiCaprio

 

On Klub (1982)

 

The Box (1983)
Video directed by Shirley Clarke
Duration: 4 minutes, 5 seconds
Performers: Johanna Went with music by Mark Wheaton and Joe Berardi
Percussion: Joe Berardi, cello: Jonathan Gold, bass: Hans Christian, clarinet: Greg Burk,
Mattel toy feedback guitar: Mark Wheaton
Engineered by Mark Wheaton and Andre Champagne

 

Knifeboxing (1984)
Club Lingerie, Los Angeles, CA
Duration: 23 minutes, 38 seconds
Music: Mark Wheaton (Tape loops, Sound Mix), Greg Burk (saxophone), Robin Ryan (percussion)

 

Primate Prisoners (1987)
Abstraction Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Duration: 19 minutes, 12 seconds
Camera: Stuart Cornfeld and Hugh Brown.
Performers: Johanna Went, Annie Iobst, Lucy Sexton. Music: Mark Wheaton (tapes, synth),
Greg Burk (saxophone), Danielle Elliot (drums)

 

Passion Container (1988)
Duration: 35 minutes
Performers: Johanna Went, Peggy Farrar, Stephen Holman.
Music: Greg Burk (saxophone), Robin Ryan (drums), Mark Wheaton (tapes and synth).

 

Hopes and Dreams of the Damned (Cue: 1:20:03 – 1:55:26, 1992)
Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACE)
Duration: 35 minutes, 25 seconds
Performers: Johanna Went, Peggy Farrar, Maureen Jennings, Tom Murrin
Music: Mark Wheaton

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I honestly just have no interest in Jordan Peterson, and happily I live in France where he is nonexistent. ** Dominik, Hi!!! My pleasure. Yeah, we’ve had, I don’t know, eight baby pigeons birthed near our windows now, and you (or I, at least) do get sort of attached to them, or at least invested in caring that their parents show up to feed them and hang out with them so they’re not lonely and coax them into trying to fly when the time comes, and their parents are pretty good at fulfilling those duties, and of course you cant help but wonder if their loyalties and impulses spring from the same place human parents’ do given how tiny and focused and differently configured they brains are relative to ours, etc. So, yeah, basically, ha ha. Paris Disneyland was lots of fun. The new Marvel Campus is solid, not amazing, and the two new rides there are good, not mindboggling. And we rode everything we wanted, and … it killed a day very entertainingly. You should be its director, clearly. Love putting you in a time machine — my love seems to have a big thing for time machines for some reason — so you could go back and see a Johanna Went performance live in her heyday because they were very weird and great, G. ** Bill, Good, good, my goal was met. Yay me. Oh, wow, thank you a lot for that link. I knew nothing about that for some strange reason. Wow, crazy and awesome. I’ll go find every minuscule thing I can about that. I’ve heard of ‘Resurrection’. Okay, I’m on it somehow. (Don’t think it’s been in France, yet anyway). ** Sypha, Much loftier (and better). Snuggly is squeamish about sex scenes? Granted, I’m not that familiar with Snuggly, but I’d vibed that they were adventurous, so wtf! Maybe Paul Curran can send some of his Yakuza friends over to Mr. Isis’s door. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yes, indeed! I wish I had an ‘in’ in that industry for all kinds of reasons. ** Steve Erickson, Try playing Merzbouw full blast? Everyone, Steve Erickson has interviewed Roger Shepherd, head of the great and legendary record label Flying Nun, and that should be very interesting, so read it post-haste, I suggest. Thanks for the fill-in on the novel. That sounds potentially intriguing enough that even the very tired (to me) zombie thing might not be a problem. Thanks! ** Billy, Hi, Billy. Oh, that’s interesting: I’d never heard that term before. Huh. That Kara Walker piece definitely qualifies. I only didn’t include it because I think it was in the first Edible post a couple of years ago unless I’m mistaken. I’m good. Paris seems un-assaulted other than by slightly too high temperatures. Are you doing A-okay too? And, if so, how so, or, if not, why not? ** Right. Unless you resided in the California region back in the 80s and/or 90s, you might not be familiar with the crazed, brilliant, mind-blowing performances of the great Johanna Went. You might know her recordings, as they were known in the general alt-music scene and still are to some degree. Happily, the LA gallery The Box has uploaded video documents of most of Went’s performances recently, which makes a post intro’ing her work possible. And I’m obviously hoping that you’ll read and poke around and discover her stuff because it’s sadly under-known. So that’s your optional blog assignment for today. See you tomorrow.

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Erno-erik Raitanens Cotton Candy Works, 2011
‘What happened when artist Erno-Erik Raitanen erected a huge wall of pink candy-floss in an art gallery? It disintegrated within days. For the installation ‘Cotton Candy Works,’ the artist hung a huge wall of pink cotton candy which visitors to the art gallery were encouraged to actively pull or eat off the wall. The cycle continues as the candy returns back to its original form once ingested and the gallery is left with a blank wall again.’

 

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Jamie Tan Cake, 2018
‘Her works hardly look edible. Instead, they emulate the textures and appearances of naturally occurring geographical formations – jagged rocks, molten lava and swirle marble. The cakes are designed to “create a conversation between both sedimentary forms and textures,” she says.’

 

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Song Dong Various, 2019
‘For three decades, Song Dong has been at the forefront of Chinese contemporary art. Using a wide range of media, including performance, photography, video, sculpture, installation and calligraphy, his edible work uses a huge variety of food stuffs to explore the intricate connection between life and art, and confronts notions of memory, impermanence, waste, consumerism and the urban environment.’

Usefulness of Uselessness – Varied Window No. 123019

Window Door No. 32019

Same Bed Different Dreams No. 32018

 

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Othman Toma Various, 2014
‘Othman Toma, an artist from Baghdad, Iraq, has put his watercolor skills to the test by painting with a very unusual “paint”- melted ice-cream.’

 

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Anna Królikiewicz Flesh Flavour Frost, 2011
‘In 2011, Polish artist Anna Królikiewicz created Flesh Flavour Frost — ice cream with the smell of human skin. She recalled: “I thought it was tasty, and that people reacted with interest, even enthusiasm, until they read the description. Because afterwards came a strange thought – that you are a little bit of a cannibal, because it’s disgusting, because it’s the taste of skin sweating in the sun.”‘

 

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Dan Cretu Various, 2011 – 2013
‘Romanian artist Dan Cretu uses: fruits, vegetables, sunflower seeds, gelatin, sugars, and even slices of salami into elaborate food art, every aspect of which can be eaten. Dan says, “The challenge is to transform a common object that we don’t notice anymore into something unusual, alive, and appealing.”’

 

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Ivan Day Menon Sugar Sculpture Centrepiece, 2015
‘In 2015 I was commissioned by the Getty Research Institute to produce a replica of a sugar table centrepiece designed by the eighteenth century French cook and confectioner Menon. The designs first appeared in Menon’s illustrated manual on confectionery La Science de Maitre d’Hotel Confiseur (Paris: 1749). My large scale pastillage version was displayed in the seminal exhibition.’

 

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John Cage Edible Drawings, 1990
‘At the end of his life, John Cage created a series of drawings composed from edible plants that were part of his macrobiotic diet. In theory this assemblage could be cooked and eaten. Cage foraged for the plants he used in this series throughout the East Coast, incorporating what was accessible to him and in season. He harvested the vegetation for this work in North Carolina, and the botanical elements incorporate a variety of plants including kudzu, an invasive species known as the “vine that ate the south.”‘

 

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Miralda Eat Art with Miralda, 1973
‘Far from the hypnotic society of spectacle, Miralda offers a participatory form of social behaviour based in the particularity of human interaction and an economics of festive exchange … For Miralda, culture is not isolated within the walls of institutions; it resides in the public domain of shared social rituals, most importantly the meal.’

Watch it here

 

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Yeonju Sung Wearable Food, 2013
‘Korean artist Yeonju Sung that presents a line of edible art by using foods become a fashion series. This kind of wearable food can’t be last long. As time goes by, the food from work do go through a progression of disappearance due to the nature of food and gets gradually changed into the hideous state fading its shape and color in the process.’

Tomato

Egg

Red cabbage

 

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Sharareh Khosravani Warning, 2014
‘The Ohio-based artist has crafted a larger-than-life sculpture that’s shaped like a revolver. But instead of being made from the usual metal material, this gun is comprised of the junk food known as Cheese Puffs. The bright-orange revolver is made up of thousands of tiny puffed-corn pieces that rest on a gallery floor.’

 

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Jana Sterback Bred Bed, 1996
Iron and bread

 

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The Tattooed Bakers AWAY FROM THE FLOCK (After Damien Hirst), 2015
Rainbow vanilla sponge, buttercream, icing, raspberry jelly

 

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masharu, SasaHara & Elvira Semmoh The Museum of Edible Earth, 2017
‘If you ever feel like tasting soil from various countries,…there’s an exhibition for you. The ‘Museum of Edible Earth’, which has opened in St. Petersburg, serves guests with samples of earth. Roughly 250 varieties of clay and chalk from all around the globe can be tasted. One of the visitors says she was worried about something happening to her body after tasting soil. “I actually work with food myself, so I am always looking for the earth that I can use to add to food for seasoning. Also, sometimes when I eat it, I can hear the sound of my mother saying “No, don’t do this, it’s bad, it’s dirty, you are going to get sick.” But as she examined and tasted it, she found it became pleasant and easy to enjoy.’

 

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Dieter Roth Gartenzwerg, 1972
‘Due to conservatorial provision, Roth’s work — a Garden gnome encased in chocolate — is not allowed to be moved nor be exposed to any other external man-induced events such as change of temperature or strong light. Otherwise it faces irrepealable decomposition. The work is manoeuvred into a curatorial impasse and hence not removable from it’s momentanous position. Making a photography of “Gartenzwerg” in one take, theoretically would have required four flashes at full capacity. The museum at first insisted on three flashes, in the end agreed to five such. Under inspection of the responsible conservator in the end only four flashes could be made.’

 

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Dinara Kasko Various, 2016 – 2020
‘Experimental Ukrainian pastry chef Dinara Kasko actively works math into her creations, incorporating principles like the Voroni method or utilizing 3D modeling and printing to create different cakes or silicone molds. If the cake shapes are unfamiliar, it might be easier to relate to some of the ingredients she uses like sponge cake, chocolate mousse, berry confit, shortcrust dough, and meringue.’

 

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Mina Cheon Eat Choco·Pie Together, 2018
‘Kindly donated by the Orion Co., 100,000 Choco·Pies will be installed on the floor of Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Busan for the audience to eat during the entire exhibition duration. The piece calls all North Korean defectors in South Korea to come “Eat Choco·Pie Together.” “Eat Choco·Pie Together”. In December 2017, when the 24-year old North Korean solider “Oh” ran across the DMZ and was shot at, he woke up from his surgery in South Korea and said he wanted to eat Choco·Pie. This reflects how the Choco·Pie has become a unique cultural symbol of liberation and freedom to North Koreans, while being an actual cultural object of loving exchange between the two Koreas. As seen in the famous 2000 film JSA (Joint Security Area), the snack instills the Korean cultural psyche for dreaming and desiring Korean unification, friendship and love. Continued as one of the number one smuggled snacks today, one Choco·Pie is known to be worth three bowls of rice in North Korea. Over many years, Choco·Pies have been sent over the DMZ in helium balloons by the thousands from South to North Korea while the snack is distributed all around the world, demanded by the international market. Each Choco·Pie individual wrapper comes with the Chinese character “Jung 情” (love) and a Korean motto “A New Beginning 새로운 시작.” The artist selected it to symbolize the love and friendship between the Koreas and for the peninsula’s new era of peace and cooperation. As an installation, the piece is dedicated to the North Korean defectors in South Korea. This highly interactive audience participation artwork promises to be a big hit and sensation since Choco·Pie is a very much-loved snack, and the sweet taste and chocolate aroma will accentuate the healing aspect of art, very much needed for our divided Korea.’

 

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Rachel Shimpock Bread bracelets, 2015
‘Rachel Shimpock is a trained metalsmith with a desire to bring the comfort of food and the wistfulness of personal memories into her work. By electroforming and powder-coating actual food – in this case slices of bread – she is able to preserve and embellish it. Bread bracelets is made from bread, electroformed copper, silver, enamel and citrines.’

 

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Zoe Leonard Strange Fruit, 1992 – 1997
‘Strange Fruit is at once a meditation on loss and a testament to needless suffering from government complacency. Leonard purposefully abstained from a preservation technique, contesting the notion that art should be maintained. The fruit skins—emptied, dried, faded, repaired, ornamented—have the feel of photographs or religious reliquaries. Despite the futility of sewing and adorning of rotting fruit, Leonard’s delicate mending quietly illuminates that the effects of time are as unpredictable as they are inevitable. The discordance between the fruits’ slow decay and the rapid, innumerable deaths from AIDS extends into themes of mourning and memory, absurdity and pain.’

 

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Romina De Novellis Augurii, 2014
‘The work stages the corporal and mental dialogue between a woman, Romina de Novellis, embodying humanity in all of its fragility, and vultures, tautological symbols of predatory behaviour and carnassial drives (that are certainly present in these birds, but perhaps also in humans).’

 

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Peter Anton Chocolate Bunny, 2017
chocolate & mixed media

 

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Daniel Spoerri Various, 1973  1982
‘Daniel Spoerri, the Swiss-Romanian artist’s most celebrated works encapsulate the adventures and pleasures of dining in good company. These are the tableaux pièges (‘snare pictures’) that Spoerri began to make in the 1960s, for which he fixed in place the detritus that was left on a table at the end of a meal: used napkins, empty bottles, dirty plates and coffee cups, overcrowded ashtrays. Spoerri took it up and preserved it, flipping the glued ensemble on its side to hang on the gallery wall: a simple but inspired gesture by which table turned tableau.’

 

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Bruce Nauman Eating My Words, 1966–1967
‘Nauman spreads jam on individual letters cut from bread.’

 

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Nicole Wermers Food In Space, 2012
‘During walks through Rome Nicole Wermers came across the displays of typical artfully made Sicilian sweets. Inspired by their sculptural qualities and levels of abstraction of religious mythology, Wermers designed sculptural sweets that will be shown on a specifically made steel shelf hanging from a wall of the gallery.’

 

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Bob Seng and Lisa Hein Jello Brick Wall, 2014
‘Lisa Hein and Robert s=Seng propose their interpretation of wall in the form of a process-oriented work delivered by means of a cooking demonstration. Usually bricks-and-mortar bring to mind the feeling of permanence, stability and protection, but the Brooklyn-based artists have instead, swapped out the concrete building blocks for something a little bit more wiggly jiggly – moulding colourful slabs of juicy jello in a range of flavours to assemble a partition.’

 

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Sharona Franklin Mycoplasma Altar, 2021
‘Franklin has been producing art works since she was around four years old. As a child, the artist was diagnosed with Still’s disease, which causes severe, painful inflammation of the joints and internal organs. She also contends with endometriosis and two blood disorders, among other physical issues. Through her gelatin sculptures—which she calls “bio-shrines” to her treatments—the artist aims to show that being bed-bound for 90% of her day-to-day life and walking with a cane, when she can, is not a roadblock for creativity. Nor are the medications she takes, or the biotechnological testing she’s been a part of since she was a toddler. Franklin defines her art practice, and this retrospective exhibition at King’s Leap, as “the embodiment of biopharmacology, biocitizenship, and the unveiled autobiography of a daily ritual, private self-injection, and the treatment of genetic disease.” The comforting quilt is meant to represent antibodies that take shape once inside Franklin’s body, while the plates examine “questions of ingestion, mutation, and regeneration.”’

 

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‘David Allen Burns and Austin Young / Fallen Fruit creates beautiful and sumptuous spaces where audiences can enjoy museum collections in new, unexpected ways that simultaneously reveal a series of layered social constructs. This Art project began in Los Angeles by creating maps of public fruit: the fruit trees growing on or over public property. The work of Fallen Fruit includes photographic portraits, experimental documentary videos, and site-specific installation artworks. Using fruit (and public spaces and public archives) as a material for interrogating the familiar, Fallen Fruit investigates interstitial urban spaces, bodies of knowledge, and new forms of citizenship. From protests to proposals for utopian shared spaces, Fallen Fruit’s work aims to reconfigure the relationship of sharing and explore understandings of what is considered both — public and private. From their work, the artists have learned that “fruit” is symbolic and that it can be many things; it’s a subject and an object at the same time it is aesthetic. Much of the work they create is linked to ideas of place and generational knowledge, and it echoes a sense of connectedness with something very primal – our capacity to share the world with others.’

 

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Rebecca Holland Pink Sheets, 2007
cast sugar

 

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Ed Ruscha Chocolate Room, 1970
‘During the 35th edition of the Venice Biennale in 1970, many of the American artists set to display work boycotted the show and withdrew to protest the U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, including Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein. Of the 47 artists listed in the catalog for the show highlighting lithographic works, only 24 remained. After much personal debate on whether he would choose to participate, Ruscha asked his mother to send a letter stating her approval of his participation. Due to the space freed up by the withdrawal of so many artists, Ruscha was given space to create something new for the Biennale.

‘At this point in Ruscha’s career, he was producing prints utilizing organic materials like coffee, caviar and — you guessed it — chocolate. After procuring just about every tube of Nestlé chocolate paste he could get his hands on, Ruscha created 360 prints covered in chocolate and hung them on the walls of his room within the American pavilion. The result was sensational, while it lasted. One can imagine that a room covered in sweetness in Italy during the summer would have a short shelf life. Halfway through the Biennale, the original Chocolate Room was attacked by hungry ants. And it wasn’t just the animals that wanted a taste; human visitors, entranced by the smell of the installation and piqued by curiosity, touched, scratched and licked the walls.’

 

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Maurizio Savini Untitled, 2008
‘Two assistants soften the pounds of pink, stretchy bubble gum Italian sculptor Maurizio Savini fashions into gravity-defying businessmen, but—lucky for them—they don’t have to chew it. In Savini’s opinion, bubble gum, “is more versatile material compared to those used by the ‘traditional’ arts, such as painting,” says one of his assistants, Academia di Belle Arti student Riikka Vainio. Her job involves melting bricks of raw gum into malleable sheets (though in the past, the assistant unwrapped and melted hundreds of individual sticks) using a hair dryer-like tool called an industrial phon, which Savini carves with a razor-sharp scalpel.’

 

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Aude Moreau Tapis de Sucre, 2013
‘French artist Aude Moreau has created a carpet that is not only good enough to eat off of, but is actually edible! The sweet furnishing, aptly titled Sugar Carpet (or Tapis de Sucre), is made of over two tons of refined sugar. The delicate floor installation is refined both in terms of its purified components and its elegant resemblance to incredibly ornate with intricately woven patterns customarily found in opulent Persian rugs. The fragile installation responds to footsteps just as one would imagine a pile of sugar to react to movement, which has required attentive maintenance in its construction to make sure that each granule was in place to support its structure at the beginning of its run.’

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! There’s this kind of awning on my building that’s near my windows, and pigeons often build their nests there and have their kids who then stumble around there for a few weeks before they can fly, so I spend a weird amount of time watching pigeons basically when I’m smoking at a window, and pigeons are actually kind of complicated to some degree, at least with their kids whom they look after and feed and try to encourage to fly and stuff in a totally recognisable caring parental way, so I guess when they’re not avoiding your feet on the sidewalk looking for scraps they have a somewhat developed social life, or so it seems. Castle of Terror: good pick! Ha ha, it’s true that just changing that one word goofily would make true crime reading a different kind of experience. I’m going to Paris Disneyland today so all love has to do for the time being is make waiting in line to ride the rides last less than a minute whenever I decide to stand in one, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Oh, Randy Newman, yay! Thank you. ** Russ Healy, Hi, Russ. Definitely do whatever it takes to make sure my blog is not a destructive force, especially re: your writing. I’ve never heard of The Gingerbread Castle in Sussex, NJ, and I’m a giant theme park nerd, as you no doubt have surmised, so thank you for the google housed adventure in its direction that I will soon embark upon. ‘Typing’ is very recommended. You’ve probably seen the Ray Johnson documentary ‘How to Draw a Bunny’, but, if you haven’t, do, ‘cos it’s really great. Pleasure to see you, sir. I hope your work goes well. What are you working on? ** Sypha, I just think ‘Cometh Darkness’ is a much more charismatic title. It feels bigger. Keep at it with the publisher search, obviously. Is it not Snuggly-friendly? ** _Black_Acrylic, I don’t know Intergalactic FM, but I’ll give it a spin. Gracias. ** Steve Erickson, Yeah, I knew that JA video well from my teen years but had no idea he directed it. Same with the Godard film of them playing on the roof. You’ve successfully warded me way off that Highsmith doc. I totally agree, the Joe Dante sequence of the ‘Twilight Zone’ movie is easily the best one and really terrific. 7 tracks, not bad, not bad. No, I haven’t read the Gretchen Helker-Martin book. I’ve never heard of it. What is it? Ah, thanks for the fill-in on your thoughts on the elevator scene. Interesting challenge to try to represent something like that in a non-standard way. Zac and I are working on doing that with the ghost in our film. ** T, Hi, T! Yes, reach out once we’re within reach. Oh, awesome about the post. Great, thank you! I don’t know how I do this almost every day either. It’s a hidden talent, hidden from me. Yes, word doc, images attached is primo. Hm, the guttural voice is tempting, but the illness, mm, … well, you never know until you try, I guess. Hopefully I’ll stay well at least until Disneyland closes tonight. I’ll wish you a week wherein everyone you encounter is dressed in a Disney character costume and is endlessly friendly and huggy. ** Robert, Hey, Robert! Welcome back. I’ve been … how have I been … pretty okay in retrospect. If I’ve listened to Melody’s Echo Chamber, I’m blanking out. I’ll go try that new song, thank you. Yes, mixed bag on your job, but it does sound rich. But you need your brain for your stuff, that’s for sure. I used to have this drug dealer, and he was a very good drug dealer on the actual drug front, but I always had to spend a long time hearing about his eternally horrible, violent relationship with his girlfriend before he would fork over the drugs, but it was interesting to be let in there, at least for the first half-hour or so. Anyway … I hope you find equilibrium pronto. ** Okay. Today you get another round of things that you could conceivably eat but can’t. See you tomorrow.